Nick Harkaway Quotes

The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire - everything they control themselves, buy and sell.

As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.

I think Amazon is the greatest start-up and the greatest company in the world. The way they are using new technologies is not just disrupting retail, it's getting ready to disrupt everything.

Great businesses can be built on scale. I think Amazon has built a phenomenal commerce business largely on scale. Their network effect isn't obvious to me, but boy, have they used scale effectively.

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.

Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.

Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They're innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I'm not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven't been, so far, good to their customers.

Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary... That has always been a potent combination.

I think it would be a good thing in the creative community if there was less embarrassment of this word 'commercial' because that's how you make a business.

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

EBay gave me the framework to discover I was an e-commerce entrepreneur. I touched everything, from shipping to logistics.

eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.

My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it.

And you also have to do movies that are about commerce because that's what is required of the industry today.

Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.

The players in the promotion business today are, by and large, not in it for the art anymore. It's all about how many bucks can you make on a concert.

Everyone wants to call wrestling 'the business.' Why don't you treat it like a business? I don't care if you're running a diner, if you're running a car wash or a wrestling company. It's all business.

The biggest part of our business has always been moving things, not paper. With the Internet, people in Mississippi can buy things from Macedonia, without regard to time or place or quantity.

It's show business. No show, no business.

Guess what? The world changes. eBay has defined e-commerce.